16 THE BIG ISSUE 10 – 23 FEB 2017
GUNS N’ ROSES’ IMAGE IN THE 80S AND
90S WAS A STRANGE CONTRADICTION
TO A TEENAGE CERISE HOWARD.
THE ARRIVAL OF Guns N’ Roses in
Australia takes me back nearly 30 years,
to the heyday of the music scene centred
on LA’s Sunset Strip. That scene had
already catapulted several bands to
notoriety and stardom before launching
the Gunners to still greater global success.
These bands, variously (and usually
dismissively) labelled glam metal, sleaze
rock, hair metal or cock rock, included
Mötley Crüe, RATT, WASP, and simply
oodles of painted, poodle-permed, many-
spangled, studded leather and spandex-
clad others.
But for all their femme trappings –
and some of the boys in these bands,
all dolled up, were very pretty indeed
–
their music’s lyrics were riddled
with double (nay, single) entendres,
and the adolescent, wet dream-fantasy
objectification of women.
Why was it that men so hell-bent on
making themselves look like women
–
like the very women drawn to their
shows along the trashy Sunset Strip –
promoted such aggressive chauvinism
through their music?
The first I saw of Guns N’ Roses,
like everyone else living thousands of
kilometres away from LA, was in their
videos for the singles from their 1987
debut album Appetite for Destruction.
Heralding the beginning of the end of
the glam metal era, the clip for ‘Welcome
to the Jungle’ pitched the Gunners a
little differently to the LA hair bands
whose success they soon eclipsed. A
match for their more ferocious sound,
the band’s look was more “street”, while
still smacking of decadence and rock star
shenanigans.
Frontman Axl Rose nonetheless made
for a compelling androgynous figure – all
big hair, beautiful bone structure, skin-
tight leather pants and piercing upper-
register banshee wail, as he slithered,
snake-hipped, from side to side.
In 1989 I was 17 and taking to the bass
guitar with an obsessive zeal. Clueless
when it came to matters sexual, with
my latent trans identity only becoming
clearer to me in my late twenties and well
after the glam metal bubble had burst,
I still twigged that there was something
a bit odd about all those bouffant-butch
boy bands. Their over-egged machismo
belied their hyper-femme presentation.
Yet women found these absurdly plumed
peacocks attractive and they – straight
white men, nearly all of them – famously
laid plunder to their adoring groupies.
How did this make any sense?
Towards the close of the millennium
I came out to my partner, friends and
bandmates as a “cross-dresser”. Some
years later, blessed with a burgeoning
grasp of identity politics and a more
illuminating vocabulary, I embraced a
transgender identity, as I transitioned
from male to female.
So doing, I found casting my new-
found queer eye upon all that had come
before it irresistible. Axl Rose became all
the more intriguing; while his hair lost its
spray-on defiance of gravity early on, his
dress sense only become more outlandish,
“There was something a bit
odd about all those
bouffant-butch boy bands.”
Dazed and Confused